Getting more attention – tagging and understanding notifications

In Facebook as with a number of other tools, tagging is a way of bringing greater meaning to content like photos or text.

For example, if you’ve added a photo, you create a tag by clicking ‘Tag photo’, choosing the person’s face and then when you type their name, if they’re on Facebook, you’ll be able to select them.

Tagging someone makes a number of other things happen – for example letting them know that your Aunt has added an embarrassing photo of you, adding that photo to your album, and creating a link to you for anybody looking at the photo. Don’t forget that if you prefer you can also choose to remove the tag of yourself and this will break the link with your page.

Another way of tagging is within status updates. When you type ‘@’, names of people you are friends with should start to appear. Select the name of the person you’re talking about to generate a link to them, your update will also appear on their wall and they will receive a notification.

Notifications are useful because they attract people’s attention and nudge them to visit your page or group. You can use them to make sure that people are included in a conversation they might not otherwise spot.

Once you’re familiar with these basic principles, you’ll find you can use tagging in other ways as well. You can create tags to pages that you follow and groups you’re a member of. You can also tag events that you are going to. Just press @ and start typing to see if it works (at the time of writing this is a bit hit and miss for me and it won’t work for mobiles).

Will your updates be spotted? How groups, pages and events notify people:

Page updates from the page owner appear in people’s news feeds. Statistics on pages you administer will give you a rough idea of how many people have seen an update.

Updates in groups will appear in users’ left sidebar, notifications of members and their email, unless they switch off notifications in their settings or hide the group in their sidebar.

Users will not normally be notified of comments on updates, unless they’ve taken part in the discussion themselves.

Group messages

Older groups allow you to send messages to group members, but Facebook has switched this off. You also can’t send group messages to people who like your page. Strange as it may sound, this has made Events the best way to message groups of people.